Learning Colors Activity: Color Hunt

Teaching your toddler their colors? Try this color hunt!

My toddler daughter has hit “the color phase”: she knows colors exist and she’s trying everything to remember which name goes with which color. We’ve worked with sorting colors in the past, but this activity focuses on color name identification – and just one color at a time.

To help my daughter match up the correct color with the correct color name, we’ve been going on color hunts lately in our learning colors quest. I love making big concepts like color identification into simple toddler activities. This color hunt has been a hit!

Setting up a color hunt is so easy!

The set up is super easy: place a single sheet of colored construction paper into a plastic bag. For our color hunt, we went searching for red, hence the red construction paper.

Begin with a little instruction

My daughter is 21 months old and the world is so new to her! We sat together in her room looking at the red piece of paper.

“Red. This is red,” I repeated over and over.

“Let’s go find some red toys!”

How the activity went for us

The first few red items, I found and brought to her. She’d yell “RED” and put them in her red bag. Remember, it’s a color hunt and we are collecting our treasure.

Then I began providing choices: one red Lego and one blue Lego, for example. She’d mull it over before making her decision. “RED!”

Finally by the end of our brief 7 minute activity (hey, Rome, toddler activities, and color identification skills were not built in a day), she was able to pick out a few red items from her room. This was great and a big step for her!